This collection documents Blaine S. Nashold's career at Duke University as a professor in the Department of Surgery in the Division of Neurosurgery. The collection contains writings, reprints, photographic materials, patient records, consultation correspondence, lecture notes, travel notes, professional organization files, awards and honors, a 3-dimensional model, research, laboratory notebooks, departmental histories, artifacts, film and videotapes, and printed materials. Materials date from 1953 to 2003.
Blaine Sanders Nashold Jr. was born in 1923 in Lennox, South Dakota, and grew up in Indiana, Rhode Island, and New York City. Indiana. He received his a BS Indiana University and his MS in Microbiology from Ohio State University. Nashold graduated with an MD from the University of Louisville Medical School in 1949. Upon graduation from medical school, Nashold, served his internship (1949-1950) and residency in general surgery at the Montreal General Hospital and the Queen Mary Hospital in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Between 1951 and 1953, Nashold was seconded to the Office of Naval Intelligence, U.S. Navy, Atlantic Fleet and Pacific Fleet where he served two distinguished tours of duty in the Mediterranean and Korea. After completing his military service, Nashold trained in neurosurgery at McGill's Montreal Neurological Institute (1953-1955). Afterwards, he completed a fellowship in neurosurgery at the Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
In 1957 he was appointed an Associate Professor at Duke University School of Medicine and Chief of Neurosurgery at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Durham, North Carolina. After joining the faculty at Duke, he became involved in the field of stereotactic surgery, which, based on the Cartesian principle of measurement, utilizes instruments to locate specific points within the brain on which the neurosurgeon will operate. Nashold introduced these surgeries to Duke and performed the first of them in the South. He began to collect these instruments from around the world, and parts of his collection can be found on permanent exhibit in the Duke University Medical Center Library.
Along with stereoactic neurosurgery, Nashold was also interested in epilepsy surgery, pediatric neurosurgery, and the treatment of chronic pain syndromes. He received international acclaim for his treatment of pain and brain tumors, operating on foreign leaders, soldiers, and people from all over the world. From 1961 to 1963, Nashold was the personal Neurosurgeon to President John F. Kennedy.
Nashold's research focused on the neurophysiology of pain, and after his retirement in 1994 he continued studying pain after spinal injury, the use of lasers in surgery, and the effect of pulsed radiofrequency on the spinal cord in his Duke laboratory. Throughout his career, Nashold published over 300 publications in books and professional journals. Nashold was a founding member of the American Stereotactic Surgery and the president of this organization. He was also president of the World Society of Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery. Nashold received the Speigel-Wycis gold medal in 1993 for his contributions to neurosurgery.
Nashold was married to Irene Nashold (nee Halverson); they had four children. Nashold died in 2014.
Organized into the following series and accessions: Accession A2005.007, 1967-2000; Accession A2005.062, 1958-1999; Accession A2006.012, 1970-2002; Unprocessed Materials, Various Accessions, 1985-2003; Accession A2016.021, 1953-1993.
Material within this collection has been organized by accession reflecting the fact that the collection has been acquired in increments over time. Researchers should note that material within each accession overlaps with/or relates to material found in other accessions. In order to locate all relevant material within this collection, researchers will need to consult each accession described in the Series Scope and Contents section.
Researchers should also note that similar material can be arranged differently in each accession, depending on how the material was organized when it was received by the DUMCA.
